This is by Michael Arlen (1895-1956), and it was published in 1924.

Arlen's name has come up several times in my 1920s reading, mostly recently in Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife. In that story, Lucia, our protagonist's friend, helps Nat, destined to become that protagonist's husband, to choose an ermine wrap, because he thinks ermine wraps are "robes of romance" ever since he read The Green Hat... So, having read The Green Hat, I checked back to find out what it said about ermine.

First mention: "There were 396 white ermines round Iris." (Iris, who's also the wearer of the hat in the title, is our key figure.) Arlen continues, in one of the exuberant descriptions that I enjoyed throughout: "White and tawny and white. She was like a light, and you hadn’t realised what an infernal dungeon the place was until the door had suddenly opened and she had come in, wrapped in cloth of soft snow."

Now, in case you're thinking, as I did -- seriously? 396 ermines for a cloak? -- well, it's true: You need a shit ton of small furry animals to make a garment for a human... (In 1347, Pope Clement VI put in an order for 439 ermine skins for a cape for himself, plus hundreds more for a mantle and five hoods...)

Mathematics aside, however, the ermine becomes part of Iris's image, like her emerald ring: "I remember how she seemed to hold the white ermine round her with one clenched hand, and how the great emerald shone like a green fly on the soft, soft white."

And this, I'm afraid, is going to be the tenor of this post, because there are just SO many asides related to this book...


The cover of an early edition. My copy came from Gutenberg

***

So, let's get the story out of the way before I ramble off down several dozen other interesting byways. The book is constructed as a bit of a mystery, and doesn't bring all the pieces together until the final chapter, so if you want the pleasurable unravelling experience, as you work your way through all the teasing reveals, it's best to read it before you embark on this spoiler-filled summary...

It's 1922, and our narrator (never named, but we know he's a writer) is about to move out of a "mean lane" in Shepherd's Market, a somewhat dodgy area of London. It is late; he has returned after a party; and his place is in disarray because of the impending relocation. Then a woman rolls up in a Hispano-Suiza (like the ermine and the green hat, this car -- "a great yellow beast with shining scales" -- will be a recurring motif).

She's Iris Storm, and "about her, it was perfectly obvious, was the aura of many adventures..." She's 29; she has a husky voice, and she's tall, fair, and sad: "Her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day." She asks for Gerald March, her twin brother, whom she has not seen for 10 years. It turns out he's the narrator's alcoholic and reclusive upstairs neighbour.

I think this first chapter is particularly well done. We have this fascinating character, Iris, who is as wrapped around in mystery as she is in ermine; we have a tragic brother (he is by nature a hero-worshipper, went to the dogs when his hero died, and was buried even further by the events of the war); and we have a very smooth narrator, who doesn't intrude into the story, but has obviously fallen under Iris's spell.


Iris: "She stood carelessly, like the women in Georges Barbier’s almanacks, Falbalas et Fanfreluches, who know how to stand carelessly"

The first chapter also gives us Iris's account of Major-General Sir Maurice Harpenden. "They are difficult to deal with," says Iris, "handsome old men who have known one since one was so high... They are very courtly, and then they touch one... They pretend to do it in a friendly way, as any gentleman of the old school might to the daughter of another gentleman of the old school: but they make OPPORTUNITIES." She despises Harpenden. He has followed the old school path, which qualifies you "to lead your troops in battle with that gallant inefficiency patented by English infantry-commanders who know a good horse when they see one. After which you can spend the rest of your life in BANTERING." You're already warming to tell-it-like-it-is Iris...

Right from the beginning, though, there's another question-mark over Maurice, which concerns his son, Napier. "There were two roads leading from a certain tree," Iris tells the narrator (it's all somewhat cryptic at this point) "and when we were eighteen life said to me, 'You go this way,' and life said to Napier, 'You go that way.' And so we did that, and so it has been --". She goes no further, but it turns out that is the crux of the story. You don't know until right at the end, but Iris's life started to go wrong (and many other lives with it) when Maurice forbade his son to have anything further to do with Iris March.

Iris has since been married twice (one husband committed suicide, the other died on military service in Ireland), and she has since gained the reputation of being a loose-living femme fatale. She is "declassee"; she's a "shameless, shameful lady".

I'm going to put the rest of the story down in more-or-less chronological order, even though that does scant justice to the convoluted, drip-by-drip way the details emerge in the book.

The first marriage was to Boy Fenwick (and we eventually learn that this was the hero whose demise left Gerald so distraught). In 1913, he was found dead the morning after his wedding-night in the courtyard of the Hotel Vendome in Deauville. The official version is that he'd fallen from a window on the third floor. Actually, he had jumped. Iris implies it's her fault: "Boy died," she told everyone, "for purity." Society immediately judges the woman, of course. People think it was horror at Iris's unvirginal state that drove Boy out of the window. (OK, that would be a very melodramatic interpretation, even in 1913, and the narrator says as much -- "rather hasty for a young man to die 'for purity' in connection with a girl of twenty" -- but there again, people will believe all kinds of nonsense if it confirms their existing biases.) Actually -- but we don't learn this until right at the end -- the purity Boy was trying to preserve was Iris's... "He had syphilis when he married her," Napier eventually informs us, "and went mad when he realized what he had done [namely, pestering her until she agreed to marry him]." Iris -- being a noble soul after all -- tries to preserve his reputation, especially in the eyes of her vulnerable brother.

OK, so what about husband No. 2, Hector Storm, the one left on the roadside with five bullet wounds by Sinn Feiners? Well, he went off to Ireland in high dudgeon because one night she whispered Napier's name in her sleep.



Here we have to backtrack to the night Gerald committed suicide. The narrator discovers his body, but wants to keep the news from Iris at least until the next morning. In the meantime, however, Iris has run into Napier, her girlhood love, unseen for many years. The inevitable happens, even though it's just days before Napier is due to marry Venice (which sounds like a geography allegory).

The next we know of Iris is that she's really ill in Paris, and is being nursed in a highly atmospheric convent. She's recovering from something to do with a baby. (It's all a bit mysterious at first. But we eventually figure out that it's a miscarriage, not an abortion.) In Paris, too, as it just happens, is Napier Harpenden, accompanied by his wife. So there's a dilemma. Seeing Napier perks Iris up enormously. But it won't do much for Napier's marriage for him to see her again. The man is utterly distraught, and "how quickly, how poignantly, Venice, if she saw him like this, would know the difference between his easy, smiling love for her and this ... damnable madness".

Venice knows Iris's rep. She doesn't know her back-story, but tells the narrator she was never under any illusions that her husband loved her. She exerts enough pressure, however, to ensure Napier chooses to leave Paris with her, rather than staying with Iris.

And now it's the end of July, 1923. There's a heatwave. London is desperately uncomfortable: "—'uncomfortable,' that is, to quote from a gentleman who wrote to The Times about it, 'in a country so unprepared for any extreme of temperature that, if I do not seem too fanciful, on a cold winter’s day there is nothing warm but the drinking-water and on a hot summer’s day nothing cool but the sun.'" Dear old England... Nothing has changed.

And Iris is back in England, where she had said she would never again set foot. All Napier's friends are afraid that he is going to run away with her...

There's a dinner-party, followed by a swimming-party in the river near Maidenhead (reached by a long, fast drive in the Hispano-Suiza). Among the party are the narrator and Iris, Napier and Venice, and Guy (who's by way of being Napier's protector, and is therefore Iris's impacable foe). Venice pretends (or is it pretence?) a kind of adoration of Iris. She tells the narrator she likes this Mrs Storm, and trusts her. They bathe. Venice gets into trouble in the water, and is rescued by none other than Iris. According to the rescuer, Venice did this on purpose, so that Iris will "like her" (ie, be somehow bound to her). And Iris does "like her". But will this make any difference?


Whitchurch-on-Thames, upriver from Maidenhead, 2023

Two nights after this escapade, Iris calls for the narrator in her trusty yellow fastmobile, and bears him off down to Sir Maurice's place in the country. On the drive down, she tells her companion what Napier's father did to the young people all those years ago. It is her goal tonight to put it to him straight: "This is what you have done, Maurice -- the unhappiness of Venice, the unhappiness of your son, and twelve years of hell for me. Are you content?"

Arrayed with Maurice are Hilary and Guy, who see Napier as a protege whose career and respectability they need to safeguard. Turning round, the narrator sees Iris, standing alone: "It was as though her green hat stamped her aloneness with a light. How bright that green hat looked in that scholarly room, like a green flower, like a green flame!"

It's quite powerful, this next bit, pitting outward respectability (stuffiness, honour, and old blood) against inner codes (freedom, love, and the right to change).

Here's Iris, in full voice: "You talk to me of your England. I despise your England, I despise the us that is us. We are shams with patrician faces and peasant minds. We are built of lies, Maurice, and we toil for the rewards of worms. You would have Napier toil for a worm’s reward, you are sorry I have broken Napier’s career in the Foreign Office. Maurice, I am glad. To you, it seems a worthy thing for a good man to make a success in the nasty arena of national strifes and international jealousies. To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a world in which to succeed is the highest indignity that can befall a good man, it is a world in which good men are shut up like gods in a lavatory. Maurice, there are better things, nobler things, cleaner things, than can be found in any career that will glorify a man’s name or nationality. You thought to bully me with our traditions. You are right, they are mine as well as yours. May God forgive you the sins committed in their name! And may He forgive me for ever having believed in them."

Yay, go Iris!



By this time, Guy has pretty much gone over to the Iris-and-Napier side. He thinks of his own son, and how badly placed he is to advise him, and admits that the next generation "can't make more of a mess of everything than we and our fathers have done".

Into the middle of this ding-dong walk Napier and Venice... Napier tells his father he doesn't understand what he considers honour: "It seems to mean sacrificing all the things that are worth while to all the things are aren't worth while... You sacrificed my happiness to the ghastly vanity of making our name something in this world. You call that 'working for my future,' sir. And I call it the cruel sort of humbug which has dragged God knows how many decent people into a beastly, futile unhappiness."

Even Venice is won over. She's all admiration that Iris is standing up to "these beasts of men", and vows: "I’d stuff all our laws down a drain-pipe rather than keep them apart [Napier and Iris] for another minute. And I think you must be mad and bad not to see the loveliness of a love like Iris’s -- and after all this time she’s beaten you all in the end, and I’m so glad, so glad, so glad!"

Napier and Iris head off. "For a second the green hat flamed in the mist of the light that fell on the lawn, and then the green hat was gone." But then suddenly Napier is back. Iris has told him Venice is pregnant... He can't leave her if she's pregnant... It's a lie, says Venice. And now they're all worried about what Iris is up to with that car. And sure enough, Iris, accelerating the smooth yellow Hispano-Suiza like crazy, runs it into the huge tree that symbolizes the happy youth she spent with Napier before they were parted.


The famous stork

Yes, very sentimental. And melodramatic. And an awful shame for the car. We don't even know how successful Iris's fatal gesture has been, because before the narrator finally manages to talk with Venice about "that night", we learn that Napier has been off in India, and Venice now mostly lives with her father.

But the book is quite impressive, I think, in its intricate unpacking of the story, its evocation of the era, and its creation of very memorable characters and locales. Iris is a great symbol of the way women are perennially misjudged, and constantly expected to put up with the double standards of society, and a great symbol of England's ridiculous class divide (the persistence of which those characters from 100 years ago would surely never have imagined).

***

The descriptions are great.

Here's London, and it reminded me of Mrs Dalloway:

"The clock of the Queen Street Post Office stood at three minutes before eight o’clock as I passed on my way to Hilary’s house in Chesterfield Street. The roar of the marching hosts of Piccadilly was as though muted by the still evening air. The small straight streets of Mayfair lay as though musing between the setting of the sun and the rising of the theatre-curtain. Neat errand-boys, released for the day, kicked their heels about on the curbs. The drivers of the sauntering taxi-cabs looked inquiringly, impersonally, into the faces of hurrying pedestrians. Limousines lounged softly by."


London, 2023

The music of the day:

"Our fathers and our mothers have done with 'tunes.' Let there, our uncles say, be a rhythm. Let there, say our aunts, be syncopation. There was a rhythm. There was syncopation. Grave, profound, unforgettable, there was a rhythm. It had a beat like the throbbing of an agonised heart lost in an artery of the Underground. Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of past and passing things... You mourned the presence of the dead. You mourned the memory of the living. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of regret."

And, talking of regret, we're regularly reminded that an unprecedentedly awful war lies in the very recent past, and we're in the midst of a moral earthquake (the one that's more quietly described in William). Hilary is often the spokesman here. "Your generation...," he tells the narrator, "is a mess." The narrator is not having that, and protests that all generations are a mess in their different ways. But Hilary insists that advances in transport and technology have made all the difference: "Your generation... has more opportunities for being a mess than ours had... When you people nowadays begin to break loose there's no limit to your looseness... Now if a woman has kicked through every restraint of caste and chastity there's the whole world open for her to play the mischief in."

At the end, though, it's Hilary who upbraids Maurice for being "too damned imperious" with Napier and Iris: "Maurice," he explains, "years ago, didn’t realise that in our time we are not our children’s masters. Their ideas are not ours, their ambitions are not ours. And there’s no reason why they should be, since ours have sent all Europe to the devil."

***

This book has a vast sprawling mass of literary connections that I find quite fascinating. But before I get to those, we need to put them in the context of Arlen's life.

He was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian in Rustchuk (aka Ruse) Bulgaria. His family were of Armenian ethnicity; fearing persecution, they all fled to England in 1901. In 1922, he became a UK citizen, and changed his name to the pseudonym he had been using for the publication of novels and short stories. Although there were parallels between his observations of British society, and the way F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the American equivalent, "Arlen was always a foreigner, never quite able to penetrate fashionable society as he wanted".


Ruse, 2023

It's not difficult to detect racism in contemporary responses to Arlen. This blogger quotes an account where someone says, "Arlen is the only Armenian I've met who didn't try to sell me a carpet." A racism-driven pseudo-compliment if ever there was one.

Even Virginia Woolf shows herself in a pretty poor light with regard to Arlen. She met him in 1933 at a friend's dinner party: "Given Woolf’s disdain for 'middlebrow' fiction, this was never going to end well. In awe of his fellow guest, Arlen kept apologizing for his success, an experience that Woolf described afterwards in a letter to her nephew Quentin Bell: 'M.A. is a rubber faced little sweaty Armenian monkey, full of protestations, as if I’d just whipped him on the behind for writing The Green Hat'."

I didn't realize when I read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover that the character Michaelis, described as "a young Irishman", is actually modelled on Arlen. I went back and checked, and it's an absolutely brutal depiction: "He had been taken up quite enthusiastically for a time by smart society in London, for he wrote smart society plays. Then gradually smart society realized that it had been made ridiculous at the hands of a down-at-heel Dublin street-rat, and revulsion came. Michaelis was the last word in what was caddish and bounderish. He was discovered to be anti-English, and to the class that made this discovery this was worse than the dirtiest crime. He was cut dead, and his corpse thrown into the refuse can. Nevertheless Michaelis had his apartment in Mayfair, and walked down Bond Street the image of a gentleman, for you cannot get even the best tailors to cut their low-down customers, when the customers pay... Michaelis had the ear of a few million people, probably; and, being a hopeless outsider, he would no doubt be grateful to be asked down to Wragby at this juncture, when the rest of the smart world was cutting him." There's really LOTS more along the same cruel lines.

It's not difficult to imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such disparagement. Given the way identity must always have been an area surrounded by pain, it's not too surprising that Arlen eventually fell foul of the Armenian community. The short story entitled Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman, published in 1929, contained phrases deemed offensive by Armenian readers. "[These included] references to Armenia as 'an unlovely courtesan'; as 'an ignoble race'; as an 'outcast people' who were 'inheritors of centuries of ignoble martyrdoms and mean escapes.' The narrator of the story asks, 'What art could come from an Armenian? What greatness? What even of worth?' The piece concludes, with reference to Armenia, 'Why could you not die with dignity, why did you not die with Nineveh, Carchemish, Babylon?'"

You can see how this would cause anguish. Philip Ward, Arlen's biographer, "carefully and excellently explicates the context and aim of the piece. The narrator of the story is a young man -- let's assume, Dikran Kouyoumdjian -- who has just been 'stood up' by a woman he had fancied and was feeling very, very sorry for himself, his sorrow taking the form of an adolescent self-flagellation that lit on his Armenian identity... One should read the whole [of Ward's book] to understand what it meant to carry a cultural identity into a context that never quite becomes home to the soul."

All this reminded me of the sorts of controversies generated by Mihail Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years. You can't kick people everlastingly, and expect it not to mess them up.


Michael Arlen

***

The Green Hat is another of those books that has moved into obscurity, but was a bestseller in its day (it shifted 150,000 copies in the first year of publication, and was twice made into a movie, with the 1928 silent version starring Greta Garbo). It has always divided critics, however. For Philip Ward, "in the book’s free-spirited, sexually adventurous heroine, Arlen created an archetype of 1920s popular culture", which played well with contemporary readers while leaving the literary elite unimpressed. The 1924 review in the Times Literary Supplement is typical in its ambivalence; it "admired the writer’s cleverness, but was doubtful of his 'artistic sincerity', unsure whether he was actuated by 'polished cynicism' or 'romantic sentiment'. Provided that the reader could accept its 'extreme artificiality', however, the novel proved 'captivating in its idle, airy fashion'."

It seemed to similarly divide Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

One of the first times The Green Hat crossed my consciousness was in connection with the Fitzgeralds, as noted in Zelda, Nancy Milford's 1970 biography: "Sara Mayfield, who had known Zelda as a girl in Montgomery, was visiting in Paris while Zelda was in the hospital [for an appendectomy]. She was having drinks one afternoon with the son of the Spanish ambassador to the United States and Michael Arlen, whose novel The Green Hat was creating a sensation abroad, when Scott saw her and joined them at their table. He complimented Arlen on his success, and told him that he would probably be his successor as the most popular fiction writer of the day. The compliment was a little backhanded, but Arlen took it debonairly. Politely he in turn praised The Great Gatsby. After an amiable half-hour or so the two men crossed over their estimation of Ernest Hemingway's writing. Scott angrily accused Arlen of being 'a finished second-rater that's jealous of a coming first-rater'. It was with difficulty that someone managed to interrupt the train of the conversation and steer Scott off the subject."

And yet Scott Fitzgerald seemed to have this ongoing fascination with Arlen. In an autobiographical sketch of Zelda's, written at the behest of her doctors, she recalls: "I was sick... All I cared about was my lessons... Then at four o'clock one afternoon, after my lesson, Michael Arlen was at home drinking with Scott. He was very pleasant and told me to go to a clinic. I quarrelled with Scott violently because I felt that I needed him and he so obviously preferred being with Michael."

Reinforcing that, there's a strange little story from Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, about a road trip to Paris with Fitzgerald: "Scott was very cheerful and happy and healthy and told me the plots of each and every one of Michael Arlen's books. Michael Arlen, he said, was the man you had to watch and he and I could both learn much from him. I said I could not read the books. He said I did not have to. He would tell me the plots and describe the characters. He gave me a sort of oral PhD thesis on Michael Arlen."


Some of the very cool Hispano-Suiza advertising

Anthony Powell also mentions The Green Hat in A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in the long series entitled A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell, like Nick Jenkins, his narrator, lived in Shepherd's Market (the area Arlen's narrator is moving from at the beginning of the book): "In his memoirs Powell says something to the effect that he chose that locale when he moved to London because of its relative notoriety, derived from The Green Hat."

There's also a long exchange between the narrator and Iris, during their first encounter, about authors of the day. It's interesting to see the clear divide between those who are still familar to us now (Oscar Wilde; D.H. Lawrence, whom Iris pronounces "wonderful"; Paul Morand, who's a "stunt" writer; J.M. Barrie; Compton Mackenzie; H.G. Wells; Ford Madox Ford, whose book The Good Soldier is an "amazing romance"; and James Joyce, which Iris looks at "vaguely" before dropping it "absently" down with the other books) and those I had to look up (Clemence Dane; William J. Locke; Temple Thurston; Romer Wilson; Joseph Hergesheimer, and the "Imagistes", on the subject of whom Iris attempts an unsuccessful bluff).

***

All in all, this was a good experience. First for the story, second for the atmosphere, and third for the context (especially all those unknown authors to explore...).